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Decameron 59
20. It may be of interest to remark that Calandrino’s quest takes
place on a Sunday and that the story is told on the eighth
day, also a Sunday, as if Boccaccio were obliquely hinting that
Calandrino’s hope for a utopia is the specular and distorted
refl ection of the storytellers’ locus amoenus. Th e motif of Sunday
as the dies solis and as the typological eighth day (the day of
the spiritual recreation of which Boccaccio gives its frivolous
counterpart) is explored by Danielou, Bible et liturgie, pp. 328–
387. Cf. also Jean Danielou, “La Typologie millenariste de la
semaine dans le Christianisme primitive,” Vigiliae Christianae, 2
(1948), pp. 1–16.
21. For this notion of foolishness and madness see Michel
Foucault, Histoire de la folie (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1961).
22. For this mythographic motif, see Dante, Paradiso, viii, 1–9.
23. Th e comical role of parasites that Bruno and Buff almacco
play in the story is imaginatively yoked to the role of “corsari”
(p. 749), those who steal the property that belongs to others.
In this sense the two friends fulfi ll Calandrino’s own desires.
More than that, Boccaccio is lining up Calandrino, Bruno and
Buff almacco, and the pirates (for which see ii, 10) as fi gures
that disrupt, in fact or in thought, the economic order. Socially
they may well be “useless” or outright harmful, but they are
interesting, in the full sense of the word, from an imaginative
viewpoint.
24. See, for one, Macrobius, Saturnalia, ed. Jacobus Willis (Leipzig:
Teubner Verlagsgesallschaft, 1970), I, vii, 37ff ., p. 34. Cf. also A.
Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas, especially
pp. 65ff .
25. Paolo Toschi, Le origini del teatro italiano (Turin: Edizioni
scientifi che Einaudi, 1955). Toschi focuses on the motif of
the carnival and in passing alludes (p. 173) to this story of
Boccaccio as a “document” proving the use of demonic masks
in the late Middle Ages. Cf. also Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and
His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: Th e M.I.T.
Press, 1965). Th e literary connection between representation
and masking is explored by Angus Fletcher, Th e Transcendental
Masque: An Essay on Milton’s Comus (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1970), pp. 8–68.